iMac just shut off... won't turn back on.

[OlScrapIron]

Maybe someone else has experienced this: My iMac shut down gave me an error message saying "computer is shutting down, sorry"... When I restarted the OS begins to load and the whole machine shuts off within a few seconds. Will not come back on. It is a late 2009 iMac so it was getting dated and I ended up getting a new 27 inch which is amazing BUT... I was in the middle of an artist's project and it is my heart's desire to retrieve many a lengthy and lofty file from yonder hard drive... post-haste! Anyone know what this is gonna cost me?

[John Jeffers]

First thing I would do is to see if the problem is hardware or software. If you have a relatively recent OS installed, you should be able to boot into a recovery partition. Press CMD+R right after you hear the startup chime to boot into Recovery mode. If that doesn't work, you can try booting from an external disk or USB, but you need a copy of the OS installer in order to do that. For example:

http://www.macworld.com/article/2367748 ... drive.html

If you can boot into Recovery or from an external disk, you might be able to reinstall the OS. If none of those work, you probably have a hardware problem.

If it's hardware and you want the old iMac repaired, it will probably cost more than the computer is worth. However, if all you want is to retrieve the data off the hard drive, you can probably do that yourself. Go to iFixit.com and find your model of iMac. They will almost certainly have a repair guide that will tell you how to disassemble the iMac and remove the hard drive.

https://www.ifixit.com/Device/iMac_Intel

Taking an iMac apart is not easy, but if you don't need to put it back together, it's a lot simpler.

Once the hard drive is out, you can connect it to another computer and get the data you want off of it. You can use something like this to connect the old disk to another computer:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6812232002

Assuming the disk itself is not bad, it'll show up in Finder as a USB disk, and you can get the data you want off of it.

[Snarl 12/8]

I'm assuming the hard drive is dead. You've got backups, right?

[OlScrapIron]

Update on this... Had to get a new mac (poor me!). Thank god for the Gf's credit card... I will NEVER not backup a project again. Ended up doing 3 full sessions for free to catch back up. Thank cheesus the client is a nice girl and likes working with me I am posting the latest mix on the TOMB for a critique on my bass work, go easy.